- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It’s that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.
Wasn’t he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?
If I recall correctly he could have backed out but he would have had to pay I think 1billion as a penalty and worse admit things didnt go his way
300 Billion dollar portfolio, 34 Billion dollar loss (~22 Billion after he writes it off in “taxes”) and he has his own right-wing media company chocked full of nutters.
I don’t think he cares much about the individual Billions much these days. Half his Tesla stock is securing his debt.
It’s a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn’t like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn’t want to buy by the board of directors who didn’t want him to buy it.
He’s the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY?si=r0VMY7s3iZ9uaP39
That isn’t relevant to the comment though.
Okay.
He also bought 9% of it and didn’t disclose it, IIRC that had something to do with it as well.
Surely that could never happen again though! /s
X will likely merge with TruthSocial as the defacto Conservative/Right-wing social media site (named something dumb like “XTruthXSocialX”), while BlueSky will become the defacto Liberal social media site.
It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
Yeah, that’s what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.
That’s an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I’m from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy… this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
Do you think the same about lemmy?
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…
I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem.
People complain that the mainstream sites are relatively closed ecosystems, but they also complain when those sites try to be more open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People don’t like the monolith when it’s over there and they don’t like it when it comes over here, either
deleted by creator
read about embrace/extend/extinguish to see why
a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.
It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.
Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances
You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.
just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.
You need the plurality of site content
I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.
Very accurate
I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.
Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
They’ve followed through on their promises so far, and you can actually self-host pretty much the whole stack today:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
I’d perfer for mastodon to take off personally, but really at this point both are good options and worlds better than twitter.
They took crypto bros VC money.
Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?
It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.
Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.
I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.
Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.
What’s the difference, really? Aren’t they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
Bluesky is mit licensed, if it goes bad what’s to stop a fork? Once there’s interop between the protocols will it matter at all?
There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A…
Can you give a specific example of how bluesky could be?
yes, see this thread
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474
“#BlueSky isn’t decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that’s all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find “networking through Relays instead of server-to-server” as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.”
You can run your own relay, though:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
I do prefer Activitypub overall, and it’s certainly more mature, but any efforts towards decentralization should be encouraged/celebrated.
Not 100% sure but I don’t think anything would stop either a fork or a new app that uses the same protocol.
I really don’t see how it could matter tbh
I think lemmy should get atproto support too.
BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.
99% of my Feed on Bluesky was just people saying they’ve left Twitter for Bluesky. No amount of suggest less of this helped.
happens on every “new” social media platform that is similar to another social media platform. Was all over Lemmy when people were “boycotting” reddit…course most went right back to reddit when the boycotting was over.
Yeah thats how it was here after the reddit fiasco.
Tbf, were you on lemmy last summer?
Haha there is a gigantic wave of people switching over from twitter right now, that’s just what is on people’s minds. The conversation will move on soon enough.
Just like when Threads launched and or when Reddit made the API changes. You get a flood of new users who want to talk about being new users.
Lemmy is just that but Linux and reddit users
Ha ha ha, yeah, sure. Bluesky won’t defeat xitter, at best it’ll just be the “next thing” once xitter finally finishes getting rid of most of its users, which I guess will take more than 4 years from now.
The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.
The more popular it gets, the less likely that’ll last. BlueSky won’t defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.
It will almost certainly become Twitter as it was created by the Twitter founder. The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over. Which is a massive difference.
The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.
Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.
BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.
I never liked Twitter to begin with so I’m not one to defend him. My preferred one is Mastodon, but generally I don’t like the format to begin with. At any rate, I’ll still take pre-musk Twitter over Xitter any day.
Things were better before they got worse, sure.
But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.
I fully agree. When I feel like using a Twitter like platform (which is exceedingly rare), I use Mastodon
Dorsey is no longer associated to bluesky. He was removed from their board.
It’s worse than that.
Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.
https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901
Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.
My issue with BS is it took VC money from crypto bros.
What do we think will happen when they come looking for their returns on investment?
I don’t understand how those two things are distinct.
I guess they don’t consider it bluesky defeating twitter if twitter is commiting suicide. Sounds like pedantry to me.
He on that “reddit didn’t kill Digg, Digg killed Digg” mindset.
For reference: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.
Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.
Digg did commit suicide. I was there for it.
The Digg bar is why I stopped using Digg
It’ll only defeat X if corporations and specifically media and sports entities start using it.
I’m not sure it will, and I don’t really want it to. Twitter is a shithole in part because of the userbase. If Twitter dies, the users will move to Bluesky and make that shitty too. I’m already seeing porn bots appearing in my feeds with as small a userbase as there is!
And I’ll be right there with Bluesky, it’s so much better on every issue, significantly fewer bots, no ads, no premium version, and no AI
I’ve started removing trash sites. I blocked twatter and reddit at my router.
What’s Bluesky?
It’s the hot new non-billionaire controlled social media app for the 2020s: https://bsky.app/
Non-billionaire controlled so far. It’s a public benefit corporation, which is vulnerable to being Altmaned. Once it becomes valuable money will find a way.
That’s where the federated angle comes in. Not quite there yet, but as the network grows the vulnerability to the original node getting taken over by a bad actor lessens.
A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:
Anakin: Now that we’ve invested, let’s make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?Is blue sky federated? I thought it was another closed garden. If slightly more open than Twitter.
Bluesky grew out of a project at twitter whose goal was to create a federated protocol. Then when they were split off from twitter when Musk took over they had to start their own twitter-style platform to be the first player in that federated protocol. Now that that part is running they’re gradually building out the originally planned system of allowing more servers to be part of the federation: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
not billionaire owned, but a bunch of VC firms led by one called Blockchain Capital already put a 15million USD bridle on them
No. Just the same shit with less users. Let it grow (by the millions as lemmy is trying to convince us) and you’ll see. I say we get back to smoke signals
Google will find a way to put ads in the smoke
Oh, ok.
Looking like it’s about time lmgtfy to make a comeback.
Or… or… hear me out… everyone comes to lemmy?
You mean Mastodon?
Or Misskey!
Not even remotely the same kind of platform
Hopefully not. This place is worse than Reddit.
Then why are you here instead of at Reddit?
On principle, personally. I was done with Reddit after the API shit.
Yup. I’m also not super happy with Lemmy, but I’m too stubborn to go back. Meanwhile, I’m building my own rendition of Reddit, which will probably have the same problems, but at least I’m making an effort.
If something genuinely good shows up, I’ll go there. But BlueSky ain’t it, so here I stay.
I see BlueSky as different than Lemmy. In my mind, Twitter = BlueSky and Mastodon and Reddit = Lemmy and Kbin (if that’s even still around).
Agreed.
I hate Twitter’s format though, so Mastodon isn’t interesting at all to me. I really like the Reddit setup where discussion is around a presented topic (whether a link or a text post), instead of the Twitter/Mastodon format where you follow general topics and people. I don’t care about individuals, I care about ideas, and Reddit/Lemmy seem to distill ideas around topics I care about better than Twitter/Mastodon. However, both Lemmy and Reddit tend to encourage echo chambers, which I strongly dislike, hence why I’m working on something else.
BlueSky seems like Twitter 2.0, so I’m just as uninterested as I ever was in Twitter and Mastodon.
I think they meant twitter is worse than reddit and hope we don’t get an influx of twitter users.
I wouldn’t get too excited. Humans as a whole aren’t particularly smart and it only takes a small percentage of bad actors and super dipshits to spread misinformation like a cancer no matter what platform you’re on.
Our species wasn’t prepared for the internet. We should be adding courses to public education teaching how to separate fact from fiction and how to find and utilize reliable sources, but instead we gleefully elected a party that ran on deconstructing the public education system.
Oops.
🎼It’s gonna be Blue~~~ Ski~~e~s for you~ and I~ 🎶
Not best either
I wonder if the next president could do something to stop that… seems like the head of DOGE might like it (or not, if that means contrarians disappear and stop “community noting” his posts, and allow for a more echoey chamber)
Born free 🎵
